When Two Artists Polled America to Paint Its Favorite Picture

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid emigrated from the Soviet Union to New York in 1978, escaped state-mandated socialist realism, and a decade later went looking for a freer form of painting-by-mandate. In December 1993, they hired the survey firm Marttila & Kiley to ask 1,001 Americans, over eleven days, what they wanted in a picture. Favorite color, preferred size, did the painting include wild animals, was there a famous person in it.

The answers were astonishingly consistent. Forty-four percent named blue. Landscapes beat every other genre. Wild animals were preferred by 51%, groups of people over individuals 48 to 34, historical figures over contemporary celebrities 56 to far less. So Komar and Melamid painted exactly that. America's Most Wanted is a placid lakeside landscape, dishwasher-sized, with two deer at the water, three modern hikers off to one side, and George Washington — the most-named historical figure — standing in the foreground in a powdered wig.

The Dia Art Foundation commissioned them to take it global. From 1994 to 1997, they ran the same poll in thirteen more countries — France, Russia, China, Kenya, Turkey, Iceland, others — and painted both pictures for each. The results barely changed. A blue lake. Animals. A few people. China got a peasant family instead of Washington. Kenya got a hippo.

The least-wanted paintings were also the same everywhere: small, geometric, sharp-edged, in colors that did not get along. They looked like a gallery's idea of contemporary art.

That was the punchline. The piece was a Soviet joke played on the Western art market: if you actually give the people what they say they want, you do not get the avant-garde. You get a calendar.